Vast amounts of information are available on the Internet, the World Wide Web, and on smaller networks. Users of desktop, laptop, and notebook computers on these networks have long enjoyed rich content, like images, audio, video, animation, and other multimedia content. As the number of features available in mobile devices (e.g., cell phones, smartphones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), personal information managers, etc.) has increased, user expectations of those devices have also increased. Users now expect that much of this rich content will also be available from their mobile devices. They expect to have access—on the road, in coffee shops, and at home and in the office through mobile devices—to information previously available only from a personal computer that was physically connected to an appropriately provisioned network. They want news, stock quotes, maps and directions and weather reports from their cell phones; email from their personal digital assistants; up-to-date documents from their smartphones; and timely, accurate search results from all their mobile devices.
Because input capabilities may be more limited in a mobile device (e.g., a smartphone) than in a fixed computing device (e.g., a desktop computer), more effort may be required of a user to enter a search query (or other information) from the mobile device than would be required of the user in entering the same search query from the fixed computing device. In addition, because displays in various mobile devices are often smaller than displays in fixed computing devices, it may be possible only to display a relatively small amount of information at any given time on a mobile device. Finally, data connections between a mobile device and various networked resources (e.g., the Internet) may be slower than corresponding data connections between a fixed computing device and the same networked resources.